What Campaigners Need To Know About AI – Tom Newhouse (Convergence Media)

Tom Newhouse:

I think you'll see political campaigns sort of leading the way, even in front of corporations in terms of how they're utilizing this technology because they've gotta take risks to win.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Today we are joined by Tom Newhouse, VP of Digital Marketing at Convergence Media. Tom has had a lengthy career in digital campaigning. He was formerly the digital director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, and for the last six years, he's been leading digital efforts for convergence, his very long roster of candidates, pax and organizations and corporations. We're talking artificial intelligence today. Why is it in the news? How is it being used in politics, and what do political professionals need to know about this exciting new technology? Tom, first, let's explain for our listeners who might be out of the loop on why AI is such a major topic of discussion in tech right now and in politics specifically. What's the deal with ai?

Tom Newhouse:

AI's really come outta the woodworks of the last six months chat. G p t was released in November of 2022, and since then, it's really just been a deluge developments in the AI world. People were really taken by surprise at how chat G P T is gonna become the new Google or develop an entire new way of how search engines or work productivity is done. And since then, you've just seen development after development in terms of how this technology can be used by campaigns and the corporate role. Just the other week when Biden announced his reelection campaign, the R N C's immediate rapid response video to that announcement was partially developed using AI tools. So yeah, there's a lot of conversation out there right now about how to regulate it, how to best utilize this technology. It really feels like it's almost the wild West all over again. People are really scrambling to get their hands around risk, figure out what it means for the future.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, and I think it's really important that, that people understand that the specific branch of ai, artificial intelligence that we're talking about here is called generative ai. There's been artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning in politics for a long time. You know, anyone who's run an ad on Facebook or Google has relied on machine learning artificial intelligence to optimize their bidding strategy. But to your point, these, they're called large language models. So what chat G p T is, and then the, the generative ai, what's able to create these images are, are really bringing it to the forefront. So I think that's the most important part for people to understand that this is, this is just another development in ai and it, and it sort of is the, the next iteration of that technology. Obviously, Tom, most of the conversations we are having about AI, specifically in politics center around the concerns about disinformation and all the negative aspects. And, and this strikes me as, as sort of the, the moral panic that is familiar when any new technology is, is introduced. And so you can go throughout history and find examples, you know, you look at the telephone, tv cars, you know, but on the whole, we live with the technology because the benefits outweigh the risks. What are some of the positive examples of how AI will improve politics?

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah that's absolutely right. And, and just sort of echo your, your first point about this being the latest iteration of artificial intelligence. You're exactly right. I mean, as digital strategists, we've been using artificial intelligence and machine learning going back to 2017 and, and potentially even farther back than back. The most obvious example is Facebook's learning phase from 2017. That's something that's increased the efficiency of marketing on their platform by leaps and backs. And I think as we look at these additional developments and artificial intelligence, it really boils down to one key factor in which this can have a major impact on political campaigns. And that's efficiencies. But that's a really broad term. And to break that down, I think you've gotta look at how campaigns are run right now. Campaigns at their core are operations with a scarcity of resources, the scarcity of time.

That clock is always ticking down to election day, a scarcity of man hours in terms of the number of staffers that they have on the campaign. And obviously a scarcity of funds to be able to advertise, you know, initiate voter contact programs and get our messages out. And so if you look at the larger scale of artificial intelligence and how it's gonna impact these campaigns, if you can free up 20% on each one of those, as far as, you know, freeing up 20% of staffers time, freeing up those staffers to do other things that make their campaigns more and more effective, that's gonna have a really large impact at scale. But as we look at it from a digital agency perspective or a creative agency, this is really just the next step in marketing sophistication. This isn't necessarily a revolutionary change, like the media is talking about it right

Eric Wilson:

Now. Yeah. I I think a lot of people think that we're gonna get Hal 9,000 and, and Terminator and, and that's not really

Tom Newhouse:

And candidate. Yeah. <laugh>.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. That's not really what's going on here. I think, you know, some other examples that we, we can point to are around that personalization, you know, making campaigns more interactive with voters. And so instead of kind of a, a one to many, it's, it's a lot of one-to-one interactions as people become more comfortable interacting with AI and campaigns and candidates become more comfortable with training language models. You know, there's some examples that we saw in India a few I guess their most recent federal election, they had a candidate who was able to use deep fakes to translate his campaign ads into other local languages, right? And so, you know, he was very honest about that. He didn't speak that language, but people were still able to see him speaking in that language. You didn't have to worry about the literacy issues if you just did subtitles, things like that. So we're, I think there are some, some positives, and to your point, I don't think we're gonna see a lot of jobs get replaced on campaigns or in politics, but we're gonna see people doing better things with their time, and that's one way that the efficiency is gonna come through.

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah. I, I would 100% agree. You know, I think one thing that was a giant quick up call for Republican campaigns and namely digital marketers on Republican campaigns, is that for two long campaigns have been a one way street where 95% of the communication that happens around the campaign is from the campaign to the voters. We're telling voters what we think that they need to hear. We're telling voters that we need donations and we need volunteers, but we're not asking voters and supporters what they want and what they want to hear. And we're not providing nor supporters tangible ways to get involved with campaigns that aren't just transactional in nature. And so my personal hope with this next generation of, of artificial intelligence tools is that it allows these campaigns to be much more engaging and much more conversational so that people can have a personal relationship with their campaign, and they can get involved in ways that will help the campaign beyond just opening someone's checkbook.

But to be able to facilitate those sorts of developments on P pages, you need scale and you need either people to manage that program or technology to work at scale. And so my hope through all this is that campaigns are gonna be able to use artificial intelligence for these types of tasks that they haven't been able to devote the time or resources to get to previously. It's something that democrats do much better than the Republicans digital organizing. We hear about it all the time. John Federman had a, it was a 9,000 person Slack channel with his top volunteer statewide in Pennsylvania. That's the most farfetched dream for any Republican candidate right now, and gives me headaches just thinking about how that would be managed and moderated and just make it productive at the end of the day. But with artificial intelligence tools that allow the management of those sorts of platforms those things are qu quickly can become a reality for Republicans if we start to leverage these tools in the correct way.

Eric Wilson:

Now, Tom, there are a lot of people, and I think I think you actually said this yourself too, who, who say this will be the AI election 2024. And I, I remember in 2016 there were lots of similar predictions about Meerkat, <laugh>, and even Jeb Bush lasted longer than Meka in 2016. Sure did.

But what was correct about that prediction is that live streaming social video was crucial. That was how we saw all of these events happening on the trail. That's, you know, how Donald Trump's message got out. So my takeaway from that is, you know, it may be overhyped, but there's a kernel of truth. So let's say that maybe calling this the AI election, I think it's probably broad enough to be right, but what does that actually mean? Like, what are we gonna look back on and say, okay, yeah, th this is really where AI factored in.

Tom Newhouse:

Well, I think that there are a couple ways to tackle that, frankly. Number one, when you look at this becoming AI election, how American voters are going to perceive that is through the news. The news media is gonna continue to be obsessed by this because it is so foreign to that. And one thing that AI is going to do in general across all of society that's going to have probably an outsized impact on politics and the 2024 elections, is it's gonna help flood the zone on all of the news platforms, social media platforms that voters use. And so we've already seen this over the last couple of cycles where there is so much information out there that voters have diminishing trusts and traditional news outlets, they don't know what's true and what's not. You know, you can only really see that expanding from hero now.

So I think from the media's perspective, that's really gonna drive and the added factor to why this campaign, why this election will be the AI election, just because of the extra amount of confusion that this is going to generate in a space. But when you talk about, you know, how AI is actually going to have an impact on how campaigns are run, I think it's a different story. I think what we are really looking at is the democratization of tools and tactics that for the past couple cycles, only the most well-funded and prominent campaigns have had access to. Great example is video content. If your campaign is running a video, chances are your immediate consultant that you've worked with has generated a 32nd ad for you. And then you've gotta figure out how to best utilize that 32nd ad across a dozen different ad formats on digital platforms, and knowing that it's the right message, but not necessarily the, the best delivery mechanism for those places.

Now you can use AI tools, we're familiar and use tools like video.ai or runway that allows us to take these long form videos, make them more snackable in just a couple minutes, and then also use tools like runway that allow us to create videos just based off of texts that we're putting into the platform. So I I, I would never anticipate those tools replacing a media strategy or running a campaign. I think that's obviously a recipe for a disaster <laugh>. But what it does is that it should allow some of our smaller bootstrap campaigns to punch above the rate class a little bit more. It should allow them to get on a little bit more of a, a level playing field as far as the content that they're producing so that they can connect directly with voters.

Eric Wilson:

That, that's really exciting and I'm, I'm looking forward to it. And I, and I hope, hope more campaigns are taking advantage of that. You, I, I think the other thing I would add to that is I think we're gonna start to hear AI be used as kind of a punching bag or an antagonist by politicians you know, in the ways that we've heard, you know, sort of offshoring jobs, sending jobs to China, that kind of thing. Cuz it's, it's a really easy target to, to kind of other and, and I think we would have to be naive to completely ignore the potential risks, especially those of us who, who work in campaigns. You've warned that the October surprise for for 2024 will be from ai. Give us a little sketch of what you think that would, would look like.

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah. you know, I, I, I think when, when most people think about that as far as something that's gonna come out misleading from the AI space that's gonna impact the election, they think of something along the lines of what you mentioned earlier, which is the deep face. You know, I, I think that that might be overdramatized, I think that might be a little overstated as far as its risk, people are going to consume their own media and ways that are personal to them and from outlets that they trust. So the chances of some of those narratives getting out of the police and those cha is, is a little tough. But where you really start to, to get some great hair and start to con get concerned about how bad actors may use this technology is really in the cybersecurity world, these AI tools, just as they democratize the ability for campaigns to be able to generally their own content at scale in ways that voters want to consume that content, it's also democratizing the tools that hackers across the world utilize.

And so tools and including that only the, the top or upper echelon of hackers world would be able to have access to are now pretty easily accessible across the board. And so Republican campaigns, I think need to do a much better job of making sure that their campaigns are secured or aligned so that they can start to inoculate themselves from these source of attacks. Because I don't think necessarily the, the October surprise is necessarily going to be you know, a, a deep fake video or you know, a big contradiction from a campaign. It's gonna be insider information from inside a campaign that gets exposed when no one's expecting and when it's most dangerous or most you know, at risk from such a leak. So that's a sort of a hidden concern that I'm most scared about. Go to the

Eric Wilson:

Next side. Yeah, I think that's a, it's a good insight. I, I wonder if the, the opposite will be true that, we'll, we will see a video that is authentic and it will get e explained away or ignored by the media a as, oh, well, we can't be sure about this. This might be synthetic media. This might be a, a deep fake. And so you kind of have it as a, as an excuse. You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Tom Newhouse about artificial intelligence. So Tom, you touched on this just a minute ago. I wanna dig a little bit deeper. How are you using AI personally or, or professionally right now?

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah, so number one, I mean it's our, our general approach to using artificial intelligence at Convergence is to start small and grow. We're not trying to replace any core competency we do, but we're trying to make ourselves a little bit more creative and a little bit more efficient and use those building blocks to continue that down that path to becoming better at what we do. And so what does that mean? That means creating more content to being able to test and then utilizing AI to better iterate off of what we see working in space. So if our, if one of our clients is running a dozen different Facebook ads one week we wanna, we'll work to identify what's doing the best and then iterate off that created another dozen times. It's not necessarily Rocket by, but it takes, you know, a fraction of the main hours and it used to.

And so those are, those are the same tactics that Trump campaign use and Foreseeable 20 that we are able to now utilize for much, much smaller down ballot races. So that's what really gets us excited personally. I've found incredible success as, as a manager and a leader of our firm using chap t p t for task as simple as proofreading. If I wanna proofread an email before I send it, or a memo before I send it to a client, a huge resource from that perspective. But then also sum summarizing meetings, notes, agendas. Mm. if one thing that we've found really, really helpful is if we've got a very, very large creative meeting where we've got, you know, half a dozen people contributing to the meeting with Creative Concepts, we can use chat chippy t or other AI services to be able to start to really summarize and condense our thoughts that have really been a creative brainstorm wandered all over the path, it starts to get us back on track. So from that perspective, it helps us get, be much more prepared going in much more organized coming out of these meetings.

Eric Wilson:

So what, what are some things that we're seeing in the, the political industry in terms of, of products starting to leverage ai?

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah. so there, there are really a ton, at least from from my perspective political specific tools are leveraging ai. Yet I think that those will will come to market as the speed of, of this stuff expands and, and and moves forward here. But I think, you know, rumble up is, is already incorporating a lot of artificial intelligence into how peer-to-peer messaging is working for text messaging making sure that we can stay on message while also say engaging with our voters and supporters. It's really important.

Eric Wilson:

So they're, they're using it to, to like help people generate text message copy, right?

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah, absolutely. From a response, if someone comes back with a very specific question that isn't necessarily Oh, cool, in an approved response or we don't have an approved response for, they should be able to, to provide some guidance in terms of how to answer those questions. But but you know, the way I look at it, Eric, is you look back to the last few major elections presidential elections, looking at the oh eight, the 12 and the 16 campaigns, 2020, I'm gonna put a little asterisk next to just cuz of how a polarizing both Biden and Trump were. But oh eight and 12 O Obama used Facebook and social media for digital organizing massively. And in 2016, the Trump campaign really was the first national campaign for leveraged digital first media strategy. And so those campaigns that innovated, they won and we're really forced as, as campaigns to be able or to, to have to adopt these new technologies because the, if you don't, your opponent will, it's a zero sun game. And so I think what you're gonna see with this new technology is a little bit of a return back to 20 16, 20 12 cycles where campaigns of all sizes start to become a little bit more returned to being laboratories of innovation where we have, we have to use these opportunities to test out new technologies. And I think you'll see political campaigns sort of leading the way, even in front of corporations in terms of how they're utilizing this technology because they've gotta take risks to win.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. I I really hope you're right and I'm excited about it. What's a strategy that campaigners can, can use to kind of cut through the hype and make sure that they're, they're using AI in smart ways, but they're also not being fooled by, you know, AI as a gimmick?

Tom Newhouse:

If it's too true, it probably is <laugh>, right? I think, I think if, if you can start small and grow and, and use a, use AI in a couple impactful and meaningful ways to cut down on things that are on your plate that frankly are just sort of a waste of your time proofreading content, those sorts of things, do it. Those are the easiest, most snackable ways you can start to dip your toe in the water here and really start to have AI have an impact on the campaign. From there, it can grow, but if someone's pitching you on an AI run campaign or an AI only media strategy and a fraction of the cost, it might be a fraction of the cost, but you're gonna get a fraction of the results as well. So you know, what we've gotta remember is that what, what wins campaigns are messages and stories, and we've gotta be able to determine the right message and then tell it in a compelling story so that it connects with voters. And that's not something that I don't think any candidate or campaigning wants to put in the hands of artificial

Eric Wilson:

Intelligence. Yeah, I, I I sort of advise people to think of AI like you know, a very, very competent, reliable intern and, and start to use it for particularly like chat G P T you know, for tasks like that you know, where with, with proofreading helping you generate ideas, take notes, summarize things like that. What what's out there that's a, a problem that you're ready for AI to solve that you'd like to see built in this space?

Tom Newhouse:

Yeah, I mean, I, I've sort of mentioned this earlier, but I think Republicans are at a, a significant disadvantage against Democrats when it comes to digital organizing, and we may not even call it digital organizing on the right side of the aisle. We, it might just come from the form of donor and supporter maintenance and retention efforts. We've got to do a better job on the Republican side of the aisle, providing our supporters a way to help campaigns without just opening up their checkbook or knocking on doors. There are thousands of other ways that people can contribute to the movement cause of a campaign, but in the past, we haven't had the Manpower Management capabilities to be able to, to really direct those efforts and that fire in the right direction so that it can helpful for the campaign. I think with those problems become much more solvable, we can allow our supporters the means and the the ways in which that they can engage with a campaign in a leading way and start to become advocates to the campaign, not just supporters. Democrats do a fantastic job of having all their top supporters be advocates of their campaign, recruiting additional supporters with that recruit additional and additional et cetera. Republicans still do that. I think this is something that will allow us to scale those efforts a lot more.

Eric Wilson:

My thanks to Tom Newhouse for a great conversation today. You can learn more about him in our show notes. Check out Convergence Media, follow him on Twitter. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, maybe you learned about AI Chat, G p t something new maybe you're a little less afraid of ai, all that we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. You look smarter in the process. It also helps get the show in front of new people. Remember to subscribe to the Business of Politics Show wherever you get your podcast. You can also sign up for email updates at business of politics podcast.com. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

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